> What liberal values? The democrats strongly supported...
Democrats are moderate conservatives, not liberals. There are no liberal parties - and certainly no left-wing parties - anywhere in the American mainstream.
> Meanwhile, the liberals are in favor of big business above all else and will gladly vote to bail out companies while their attempts to help working class families is an utter joke.
Your definition of liberal seems very different than the typical definition.
> Liberals (at least in US/Canada) used to be the one who would care about working middle class and their living conditions.
This confusion is understandable, but liberals never cared about the working middle class. Its just that in the US, the democratic party is a big tent of liberals, socialists and progressives, and the other side is a big tent of evangenicals, libertarians and conservative.
The ones that (claim to) care about the working class are the socialists. Liberalism comes from the French revolution, and is exported to the world through Amsterdam (appropiate in this topic!) and its value system is the foundation of modern day capitalism and enterpreneurship by free individuals (no matter how you pray or what you say) in a republic (every vote equal). So standard, you take it for granted.
You find the same disconnect between values in the other tent. Libertarians preaching small government for a republic ticket, even though every republican president has ended up spending more money than any president before.
One of the big downsides of first-past-the-pole is that a political world simplified to just two sides, doesn't do most people justice. Don't vote for the democrats if you want socialism. Don't vote for the republicans if you want libertarianism.
Evangelicals and progressives on the other hand, can do bussiness with the liberals and conservatives, since what they want isn't incompatible. Liberals hear progressives talk about 'inclusion' and they hear 'more customers' (hello, rich gay couples) or 'cheap labour' (hello, poor immigrants) and they get all wet in their stock portfolio.
Sidenote: If you ever wonder what America would look like when its just libertarians and socialists having to come together .. its called Burning Man, where autonomous libertarians feed socialist hippies, without liberal transactions or conservative judgment.
> this sort of nakedly exclusionary urban restrictionism is a particular shame of the left.
But that doesn't really address my point. Also, I disagree with that statement on two counts. First, "Democrat" and "liberal" are not synonyms, and second, it's not a "particular shame of the left". It's a shame of the wealthy and privileged.
> In modern US, GOP represent the conservatives and Democrats are liberals
This is totally inaccurate. There is a small aspect of the parties' rhetoric that evokes liberal and conservative ideals, but no substantial policy differences.
> I was just in Kansas, and all I saw were people that would benefit massively from Liberal/Democratic policies, and yet vote against their best interest Every. Single. Time.
I think this was a true statement a decade ago, but political ideologies have shifted dramatically within the parties.
For one example, look at who was fighting against illegal immigration in order to protect blue-collar union jobs in 2005 versus now.
> I hang out with pretty liberal people and no one actually believes anything like this
There is a broad streak of illiberality running through left-leaning Americans who call themselves liberal. At its core liberalism maintains not that everyone is equal in every way, but that virtually everyone is equally capable of flourishing if given the same opportunities.
Liberalism must believe that since its unit of measure is the individual, not a faction or state.
If someone who calls there’ themselves liberal doesn’t believe that I’d like to know what they think liberalism is.
> Liberals are committed to egalitarianism, simply unable to recognize massive differences in competence between humans.
I don't believe this is true at all. Many socialists do vote for the Democratic Party as the lesser of two evils, but liberals are not committed to egalitarianism at all costs. They have used the Federal bureaucracy as a jobs program since the end of the civil war. Similarly, the mitilary tends to be a jobs program for the more conservative parts of the country. Efficiency and performance has rarely ever been the goal, employment has.
> Who you have described are reactionaries, not conservatives.
Indeed, that’s exactly what they are. But they prefer calling themselves conservatives. It’s better from a marketing perspective.
To be fair, there are not many politicians that could be called old-fashioned conservatives in the US. Most of them are a subset of the republican establishment and they were mostly wiped out in the last couple of years.
> to consider them conservative because of that is like considering the Democratic People's Republic of Korea democratic.
Definitely! Unfortunately, that’s how the semantics went, though. In the same way as what most people call “liberals” now are very different from who liberals used to be (they used to be all about capitalism and free enterprise, for example).
> Almost every political party in western democracies are “liberal” in the classical sense.
There is an interesting case made[1] that while this used to be true, it is actually not the case any more and that things are starting to become rather anti-liberal on both sides of the political spectrum.
> Liberals ("neolibs") fucked up bad by taking the working class for granted and letting globalization erode them
I can't help but take note of the dichotomy that exists in current US politics. The implication seems to be that Liberals took on a policy stance that was electorally unfavorable and could jeopardize their ability to win elections. And yet:
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Democratic Party. You should. Liberals will always be with us. If liberals become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon liberalism. The will reject democracy." - nobody
Liberals are not a political party. You're talking about the Democrats, which as a party isn't really all that liberal.
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